Never Follow the Monkey Path
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Never Follow The Monkey Path NEVER FOLLOW THE MONKEY PATH MOFFATMOFFAT DODO YOUYOU KNOWKNOW WHOWHO HEHE ISIS? © 2015 Robbie Moffat 1 Never Follow The Monkey Path INTRODUCTION In movies the image is still very much controlled. The actors are put in their best clothes - or at least clothes that have been selected to reveal something about their character - it is a sham. Likewise the photography of the 50's and 60's. They are portraits - often self portraits as the person in front of the camera has asked the person behind the camera to take the photograph for them. It is a moment in time that they wish to capture - they are saying - this is me and I am happy with the way I want to be remembered. Its a fix. I have a problem with this and I think it shows when I am being photographed. I would like to be captured in that moment of time but I do not know how to sum up that moment for the photographer. This makes me a difficult subject to photograph. This is quite something when you consider that I have been the cinematographer (the guy operating the camera) on sixteen of my own movies. Maybe that's why I stay behind the camera - to avoid making real images of myself . I certainly feel more adept at creating a self portrait in words than in images. It makes the portrait less ambiguous. A picture may speak a thousand words but these words will change with the viewer. No, I think what I am trying to say - that as I search for the truth about who I am and what I have become in time, I discover that the truth is a hazy landscape covered in a blanket of mist. So why I would write down some of the things that happened to me in my life is easily explained - I want to have a look at what I've done and at the end of the process be able to say 'I never followed the monkey path'. At the point of starting this book I had no agent, no publisher and not even an inkling of an audience. Unlike actors or performers I have never been in front of the camera. However, I had been encouraged by those around me to spill the beans, pop the toast, and serve up something edible as they believe I might actually know something that other people might find fascinating. So now we are going to find out. The funny thing is - when someone asks you if you have met anyone famous my first reaction is no. When you meet someone famous - firstly you are star struck or at least slightly in awe, then after awhile they become human, exhibit the same flaws, sometimes even more acutely so than someone in your own family or a friend might reveal. Most times you like them, then boy oh boy, sometimes you don't. But this book is primarily about me -- who I am, what I am about, how I've got to the place I wanted to go (partly), how I exceeded my own expectations, and finally the realisation that I still have a long way to go. I am sixty, the government has extended retirement age, so I'm done for, I have to keep working. © 2015 Robbie Moffat 2 Never Follow The Monkey Path My thanks to everyone who has put up with me from the moment I was born until the present day. I wouldn't be the person I am without a single one of you. Robbie Moffat © 2015 Robbie Moffat 3 Never Follow The Monkey Path GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY I made my first feature film in Glasgow. This was not an accident; it probably was a consequence of having been born there. The adage in the writing business is that you write what you know and I think by in large I agree with that. There are exceptions - I have not lived in the sixth century, I have not been abandoned on an island thirty years, I have not been on a space ship hurtling towards the edge of the universe - like I said, there are exceptions. But when it comes to getting started in any kind of writing art form - poetry, novels, plays, screenplays - I always started with what I knew- I drew mainly from my own life experience. I was born in Stobhill Hospital, Springburn, Glasgow at 10.35am on the 25th March 1954. I was nine pounds thirteen ounces and the doctor declared to my mother that I was longest baby he had ever delivered. I was measured and pronounced to be twenty-four inches long - that's sixty centimetres, so I must have been curled up like a snake in my mother, as she was only five foot two inches tall. Whether this is an accurate account of my first appearance in the world or not, the story came from my mother herself when I was very young, so why should I question it, she was there! Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction and perhaps there is some truth to it as I grew to be six foot three inches by the time I was fifteen. My mother Isabella Moffat was a domestic servant. My father was registered as unknown, and to this day I do not know who my father is/was. As a child I was not particularly interested in finding out as it was obvious that whoever it was had caused my mother a lot of pain. More than that I think, she was ashamed. Not of me, but the fact that she could not speak about him to me or any of the rest of her family which was an enormous family by today's standards. My grandfather George was one of sixteen children, and my mother one of a mere six. My grandmother Mary Brown Ramsay was the daughter of a Linlithgow milliner but instead of moving up to the middle-classes, my grandfather then a miner in Rosewell, managed to descend her and his family including my mother into tenement poverty in West Russell Street, Cowcaddens, a notorious rough part of Glasgow (street now gone). As a child I did not see any of the poverty, I did not know anything else and my first residence may have been in that one room and kitchen gas-lit tenement in Callander Street that my grandparents inhabited from the Second World War onwards, now a car park. My birth certificate gives my mother's usual residence as 50 Craigendmuir Street which is in Provanmill, East Glasgow, and that, if I remember right, was where my Auntie Mary © 2015 Robbie Moffat 4 Never Follow The Monkey Path and Uncle Richard lived with my cousins the Hobans. The Hobans are a whole different story but I am grateful to my cousins Brian, George and Ian for their gang connections and teaching me how to take on bullies and win. So my first two years are a blur. I don't really remember where I lived except that I remember staying at Auntie Robina's (my mother's eldest sister), Auntie Margaret's (my mother's first cousin), as well as Auntie Mary's and my grandparents. I was farmed out to pre-nursery at the age of four months as my mother had to work. I never knew where that nursery was until forty years later. All through the Nineties I had a puppet company and I performed anywhere and everywhere in Central Scotland for ten years. Towards the end of this period I was asked to perform in a small children's pre-nursery in the east end of Glasgow. The moment I walked into the place I knew it. It was a very old building and suddenly the memories of being a baby came flooding back to me. I did my show and as I was leaving there were two small rooms along a small corridor. The doors were open and as I looked into one of the rooms I saw a child's cot with the high sides of the type that I had been so often placed in. Being born two feet long and being bigger than the other babies my age made me a handful. Being placed in one of these cots by the nurses had been their way of breaking some of my wilfulness. Naturally it did not work, but this was the room where I was isolated and left to cry all my early tears. I felt unwanted. My mother loved me with all her heart and worked to provide for me, but it left me with an emotionally detached nature for decades. I did not understand it immediately, but when I transferred to nursery school proper at the age of two and a half, I knew I was on my own, that the world was not fair, and that somehow I had been singled out as the difficult kid. To top it all, I was left-handed. Hence my hatred of porridge. There are not many Scotsman who will admit to that. The wilfulness that had got me into so much trouble at pre-nursery continued at nursery proper as they tried to make me bend to the system. In the cot detention phase I learned that if I threw my golliwog out of the cot and bawled long enough, I would get my golliwog back. All I really wanted was someone to say 'Aw what a lovely wee boy you are' rather than treating me like the little bastard child I was growing up to be.